


This Dreamer Cometh

by TheFantabulousPandemonium



Series: Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Depersonalization, Dissociation, Families of Choice, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Memory Loss, Morally Ambiguous Character, Self-Insert, Sharing a Body
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-13
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-12 18:20:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11167440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFantabulousPandemonium/pseuds/TheFantabulousPandemonium
Summary: Death was as easy as breathing.Her eyes cleared agonizingly slow, the black fading to blurry grey to a less blurry off-white that looked like the interior of a rather bland classroom. Or it would have been bland, had it not been covered in splattered blood and clumps of flesh that she couldn’t place the origin of. Something within her bared its teeth with a motion akin to pride, warmth curling around her limbs and what she thought might have been satisfaction washing down her spine.And she was surprisingly okay with that.





	1. We Forget Because We Must

**Author's Note:**

> purely indulgent si fic that kind of turned out to be more of a twisted au version of zabuza but what the hell, i enjoyed writing it as it's a nice break from the ones im working on

Death was as easy as breathing.

One breath took her halfway across the road. She’d been careful, always had to be when this section was known for assholes who didn’t stop for pedestrians. It’d been clear. A nice night, really, with no traffic aside from the lone, sporadic headlights of people heading home. And she’d actually used the crosswalk, for once, instead of heading across a few buildings down.

She’d been looking forward to her bed, to the leftover Chinese in her fridge and maybe a glass of fireball. Her cat needed to get a helping of wet food, too, else he’d be biting her feet all night. A brief smile flickered over her face at the thought.

By the next breath none of that mattered.

The car hadn’t seen her. It ran through the red light and kept going, far faster than it should have been. She flew.

One moment there was the most excruciating pain she’d ever experienced and, in the next, there was _nothing_. It felt, she thought, like someone had stuffed her in in a casket filled with cotton. Caskets were nice. Expensive, but nice. She wondered if her family would be able to afford one.

She didn’t know how long she stayed there. Floated there? Time had never been kind to her and she, in return, never had the tightest grasp on its passage. Several hours could pass in the span of a blink and she could spend the day working only to find five minutes had passed. All she knew was that it stayed dark and suffocating until it wasn’t, until she could hear ragged breathing ringing in her ears. It was loud, whipping through her with the force of a hurricane at each exhale.

It felt important to count them.

_Two._

_Three._

_Four._

Laughter, then. It was soft and guttural, like a child with a sore throat who insisted on still going to school, and just slightly unnerving and off-kilter. She wasn’t usually around children any more, wasn’t used to curbing her language or softening terms they wouldn’t know. Slowly, she began to breathe in time with the noise in her head, easing into the forgotten motions. Her casket was becoming more of a wet-suit, too-tight pressure constricting her chest and making her limbs buzz with static like they’d been asleep for far too long. Opening her eyes was as easy as taking the next breath.

They stung.

It was slightly below the level of forcing herself to wear contacts, but worse than getting something stuck in one or accidentally jabbing herself in the eye. Pain was good, though. Pain meant she was alive.

Confused and disoriented, but miraculously alive. Of course, people probably felt rather alive if they went to some sort of afterlife or something similar, but she feel her heartbeat singing through her veins and the lingering aches and pains that came from losing quite a lot of skin and body parts.

Two.

Three.

Four.

The harsh breath in her ears was her own, she realized. Ragged and harsh like she’d just run a five minute mile without slowing down from a dead sprint the entire time. There was something knotted up in the vague direction of her stomach, tight between her shoulders, and in her left hand. They felt like emotions, distant ones that she’d never been particularly good at deciphering nor had the patience to teach herself how to read them.

Her eyes cleared agonizingly slow, the black fading to blurry grey to a less blurry off-white that looked like the interior of a rather bland classroom. Or it would have been bland, had it not been covered in splattered blood and clumps of flesh that she couldn’t place the origin of. Something within her bared its teeth with a motion akin to pride, warmth curling around her limbs and what she thought might have been satisfaction washing down her spine.

And she was surprisingly okay with that.

Of course, she wasn’t the best judge on moral character or situations. Hers were dictated more by what was polite or impolite and, while killing someone or a few someones was very impolite, it hardly explained the scene before her. Usually her tantrums ended with far more broken electronics than bloodshed.

And, gods, there was _so much blood._

The sound of feet and clothes rustling behind her broke the quiet and she whirled around on instinct, catching a flash of silver in her hand and a wide-eyed man standing near the broken door with his hands raised in a universal gesture of surrender. They didn’t speak for a few long minutes and she tilted her head to the side, staring the newcomer down with an unimpressed expression that usually garnered apologies from the bitchier customers she had to deal with.

The air was sharp and metallic between them, copper lingering on her tongue with each breath and making her fingers stick together. It was, also, fairly easy to ignore in favour of observing. Everything about the place she’d woken up in seemed somewhat familiar in a strange way, like a mirror maze with the mirrors you saw at carnivals instead. The man’s vest was grey, the shirt a darker grey, and his pants were an oddly patterned military fabric that she immediately despised on principle. He also wore a strip of cloth like a necklace. She grimaced.

It was then she became aware of the sword in her hand.

It wasn’t exactly small or the silver she’d seen earlier, but there was little rust and she somehow hadn’t cut herself on it yet. It was odd how _right_ the blade felt in her grasp, considering she was not left-handed and the only experience she had was admiring her grandfather’s antique katanas. She stared at her hand, distantly noting that this didn’t look like her own appendage. It was the wrong color, for one, and it was missing the small, raised scar on her left that had been there for as long as she could remember.

The man spoke.

“Momochi-san.” He said.

His voice wavered, the high and uncertain rasp setting her teeth on edge and two conflicting trains of thought running through her head. The first, most vehement one was that _it wasn’t her name at all, what the fuck._ Beneath that, in an undercurrent of darkness that promised more than violence in its tone, was _should have killed him too._

It was a tempting thought. Instead, she counted her semi-steady breaths.

_Two._

_Three._

_Four._

“Momochi-san, please put the weapon down.” If he was trying for diplomatic or soothing, all he managed was vaguely terrified. But it could have been slightly disappointed, for all she knew. People were hard to read. Light glinted off the metal at his throat when he moved forward, navigating around the gore daintily. “You’ve passed.”

Hesitantly. As if he feared she would strike again.

She blinked, slowly, lips curling up in a shark-like grin that mimicked the feeling in her chest. The man untied his necklace with shaking hands, drawing her attention to them. He was missing bits and pieces of them, from fingertips to concave patches of skin where flesh should have been. It was far more interesting than the room around them.

He took another step closer and she flinched, drawing the sword in front of her. It wasn’t like she knew how to use it, nor was she inclined to harm someone at the moment, but she was curious. Curious as a cat, she’d been told multiple times. So she waited for the man to approach her fully.

He did. Eventually.

The metal-plated cloth was a new weight around her forehead, a little off-balancing and more than a little confusing. It was, most likely, a significant gesture but she couldn’t dredge up enough energy to care about it. The black fabric felt more like a ponytail than she would have liked, the knot digging into the back of her head with how tight he tied it. Her free hand tugged at the hanging strands until it was situated comfortably sideways and the _wrongness_ stopped prickling at her skin.

Laughter that wasn’t her own echoed through her mind in response.

“If you could, Momochi-san,” _Yamazaki-sensei was always a gods-damned coward wasn’t he,_ something whispered even as the man made an aborted little gesture and stepped back, “we could start to clean up this… mess.”

She snorted at that, watching the man - Yamazaki - tense out of the corner of her eyes. A mess was putting it lightly. It was more of an understatement than even she tended to go for and the name grated on her nerves, not to mention her somewhat fragile self-control. She’d wanted to throw things since he’d started talking and the urge was only getting stronger.

Two.

She let her eyes slide halfway shut, lowering the blade scant centimeters. Her body reacted automatically despite the fact that she felt very much like her skin was three times too tight.

Three.

“Yes sensei.” She said.

Four.

Her voice was _wrong._ It sounded decidedly childish and masculine, simultaneously wrong and the way it’d been since he could remember. The emotions behind it were muddled and hard to pluck apart, but she left the tangled mass where it was for the moment. Stepping over a cooling body with glassy eyes and into a rather large puddle of blood, she twitched into a frown at the sensation of blood on her toes before continuing outside.

She needed to think, and the smell was starting to get overwhelming.

_Two._

_Three._

_Four._

She paused outside, the world too bright and impossibly surreal. Muscle memory carried her through the town, down tight alleyways sandwiched between grey, rundown buildings and across empty lots of deadened grass. Everything, it seemed, was grey. Fog lingered over the dirt like a heavy, dampening blanket despite it being no longer anything near morning. It was sort of pretty, sort of horror story vibe, but the white mist was mostly a familiar comfort. She’d always wanted to explore places like this; fearing flying was far too inconvenient for her adventurous soul.

She stopped at the edge of another empty lot, strands of grass tickling her feet, and breathed in. The air was cleaner than she was used to, tasting of rain and the ever-present scent of blood. Before her, the lot turned into a stand of old, gnarled trees. It was peaceful. Nothing moved to disturb the air and the few folks she’d seen on the way over here were quieter than she thought people could be. There weren’t any birds, surprisingly, nothing singing to a tune only they knew. Her insides were an uncomfortable ball pressing against her skin, making it hard to swallow for the lump in her throat.

She headed toward the trees, picking an older one that looked like it was about to collapse to sit under. Folding her legs underneath her in an uncomfortable position that put way too much pressure on her ankles, she set the sword down in front of her with enough distance that she wouldn’t nick herself should she stretch her legs out.

It was time to make sense of where exactly she’d been...reincarnated to. It was odd to think of it like that, really, and she was unsure if it really was reincarnation or if she was far too high on hospital morphine. She closed her eyes and counted.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Her name was Elizabeth Araujo. She was twenty-two, with two younger brothers and a slew of step-fathers. That came easily to the tip of her tongue, memories of her family coming easily and unbidden to the front of her mind. She loved her two little rapscallions, even if they were assholes sometimes. Her heart ached at the thought of leaving them behind.

The rest of her life was a bit of a jumble. She worked in retail, that much was certain, had been for years. And she had a passing interest in… the supernatural? She thought. A frown broke over her lips, brows furrowing.

She’d died, too. An accidental hit and run, maybe? The only thing she remembered was the bone-deep crash and a violent, lingering hatred toward cars.

Something beneath her thoughts stirred, telling her that _no, that wasn’t right at all._

She latched onto it, a noise she vaguely recognised as surprise reverberating around her skull. There was a buzzing in her ears, besides that, and it felt very much like she was trying to attempt lucid dreaming. Which, honestly, was a bad idea and a practice she tried to stay away from after that disastrous phase she’d gone through at fifteen. She gave the noise a mental nudge, projecting a red question mark into the swirling mess of thoughts her brain usually was.

It responded easily.

_His name was Zabuza Momochi. He was nine and proving a point to Yagura._

Two breaths gave her acceptance.

Three let her slip into a state closer to the surface. She wasn’t herself anymore. It was sort of obvious looking back at the past hour or so, all the mismatched details adding up.

Four started the beginning of a headache with the information her mind inferred from those two short sentences. She was now he. That, at least, she could deal with objectively. It’d always been a bit of a pain to describe her relationship with gender roles and the binary, and this was honestly easier for her.

…For both of them? Because there was no way in hell she was alone in this body, with the voice in her head and the whole pronoun thing. It did make it creepier, though. Especially since the body they were now sharing was a whole nine years old, as she didn’t exactly have her own with her at the moment.

It was a more than a decade younger than what she was used to and she was no longer a child herself, hadn’t been in years thanks to practically raising her brothers herself. It was more than a little wrong to be trapped in here with a kid.

 _He passed the test, he was no longer a kid anymore thanks_.

She made another face. His name and her new one was, apparently, Zabuza.

It was half-familiar in the same way Yamazaki was. Distant recognition clouded her mind with sensations, and she immediately associated the moniker with swords. Big ones, weapons that could take off a man’s head in one blow and keep on going. The undercurrent beneath her thoughts warmed with another flicker of pride. Despite that, a sense of heaviness lingered around the edges of it, dragging her away from her analysis of the situation with a sobering message.

_They weren’t going to live very long like this._

Even as she violently rejected the statement, there was also a blunt acceptance. Shinobi died every day, why should he be any different? Why should - wait.

_Shinobi?_

Elizabeth opened her eyes, breath coming in quick gasps. There was blood drying on her hands, a dull breeze caressing her bared arms, and the voice of a child within her mind. But she was alive.

Alive and relatively unharmed, which was more than she could say for the other children they’d left behind on the classroom floor. She inhaled deeply, bringing a hand up to itch at her check. Dried flakes floated away, getting under her nails with a vengeance, and blended into her pants where they fell.

Two breaths. Then three.

Four.

She restarted the count. It wasn’t as calming as it could have been, dragged from her usual go-with-the-flow attitude in what she was sure was an… extreme example. Whatever the future held, be it shinobi or killer robots or squalling children, she could deal with it.

She could do this.

It was as easy as breathing, after all.


	2. Marching as to War

Her previous statement was probably a lie. She could barely manage walking without tripping over her own feet, let alone deal with whatever this was.

She could only stretch her positive thinking so far and that couldn’t cover the fact that she’d woken up to what amounted to a massacre. Of children. Her mind was still struggling to come to terms with it. It’d either be repressed like the rest of her emotions or come to a head with a mental breakdown. She was fairly good at predicting patterns and avoiding situations that led to meltdowns or similar, as well as thinking about as far left-field as the back row of bleachers, but figuring out what to do with the information her mind gave her or making practical decisions?

That was where she failed. Which left her, frankly, screwed in this situation.

Her feet carried her down a half-familiar path towards the outskirts of town with less than the stumbling grace she usually possessed. It was a mostly silent trip, however. She’d been capable of silence before this, had hated making any sort of noise as she moved enough to train herself to step lightly. The quirk had started in high school and carried on with years of her coworkers joking about belling her like a cat.

Personally, she thought they all scared too easily.

Her journey meandered through increasingly run-down buildings and ramshackle complexes, crossing several more overrun lots and ending at a peeling grey door with faded numbers high above her head. The crumbling brickwork reminded her of her childhood homes, shuttled between dilapidated apartments to seedy motels for years, though those had probably looked significantly worse. Michigan hadn’t been kind to them, not in the slightest, but it was better than living on the street.

People ghosted through the streets behind her, making less sound than she had but cemented their presences by staring until she could feel it prickling at along her skin like static electricity. Most, it seemed, wore the same metal-plated cloth she now had around her head, but she could pick out at least three of them with smooth porcelain masks that had her both curious and a little wary. Word must spread fast, at least, and the looks were grating on her nerves once more.

What was a little bit more _murder_ in the grand scheme of things?

The undercurrent in her veins agreed with the dark turn her thoughts had taken. It seemed they were both prone to outbursts at the slightest things, but she was more inclined to property damage than bodily damage. At least, she had been.

_Semantics._

Elizabeth tried to ignore it, a frown tugging at her face. It didn’t work.

She looked down.

There was no welcome mat to hide a spare key under and she didn’t even think there was a spare until her fingers found a nondescript, rather literal hole in the wall quite by themselves and dug out a dull brass key. She fumbled with it, taking longer than she would have liked to get the door open. It closed with squeaky hinges and a slam behind her, the lock clicking shut rather ominously.

The hallway inside was short and dark, with a discarded pair of sandals near the other doorway. She fumbled once more with the sheath at her hip, nicking her thumb against the blade and setting the whole thing against the wall with a dark look before rolling her shoulders to loosen them and absently licking away the beading drops of blood.

 _Careless_ , he murmured. She didn’t disagree.

Her shoes joined the other pair and she stepped into what she assumed was the living room. It was small, probably a studio or a one-bedroom, but definitely a step up from her last apartment. No mouse droppings in the corners or evidence of roaches, for one.

A covered table resided in the middle of the living room, stumping her for a moment before she recognised what it was. She stopped beside the tired-looking kotatsu, just short enough to rest a palm on the scratched table top. Her eyes flicked to the left.

Then the right.

They took a sweeping glance across the room at the collective amount of dust, the single chair and rickety table in the attached kitchen, and the lack of any significant furniture aside from a futon through the open door to the bedroom. Her chest hurt at the immediate inference.

He lived alone.

Zabuza Momochi was nine years old and he lived alone.

Despite her general awkwardness and inability to communicate effectively with most people, she actually got along rather well with children. Better than adults, in most cases. But it just didn’t make sense for a child - not yet a _preteen_ \- to live like this. Back in her previous life there were regulations and rules set up so kids were in foster care or went to an orphanage instead of paying rent without a steady job. Hell, most places wouldn’t hire anyone under sixteen.

_Shinobi are different than civilians. He was perfectly capable of taking care of himself._

She snorted aloud, rubbing tiredly at her eyes and padding into the bathroom. Just because he was _capable_ of it didn’t mean he should _have to_. Beneath the affronted - she didn’t really know if he was, she just liked the word - child in her head, anger bubbled.

It was hers, she knew. She was very familiar with the emotion, used to holding it to her chest and smiling through it. The sluggish burn in her veins and the tightness of her throat gave it away, well on its way to bone-cold rage at the fact a _nine year-old_ was left, on his own and probably lonelier than she’d been, in a sketchy part of town with what amounted to no adult supervision.

It wasn’t right.

Zabuza was silent, for once. He was still there, attached to the back of her mind in a way she couldn’t ignore, but it was hard to get a handle on his agitated bundle of emotions and she didn’t have the energy to throw herself any deeper into the anger lurking just below the surface. So she left him be, went back to the main rooms, and swallowed her urge to scream.

Her rage cooled, slowly and eventually, into a simmering fire waiting for the worst time to boil over, shoulders too tight and stalking the floors of the small apartment. It was larger than the ones she remembered, with dingy grey walls and dirty carpeting everywhere but the kitchen.

She didn’t particularly like this new life any more than she had the old one, she decided, curling her toes into the scratchy rug of the bedroom. Everything was grey and the bathroom was _carpeted_. That was an abomination. At least her old one had actual tiles in it. She could, however, pace more than five steps from wall to wall here.

It didn’t stop the feeling of being trapped from sinking into her spine, adding to the paranoia welling up in her chest. She had to remind herself to breathe again.

_Two._

_Three._

_Four._

She closed her eyes for a moment, reorienting herself with another breath. And another.

She wasn’t alone in here.

That had already been accepted. They were just going to have to deal with it in one way or another.

The first thing they needed to do, however, was clean.

The dust was more an annoyance than a health hazard, really. She didn’t think her mild allergy carried over, considering he lived like this before she popped up, but the physical labor would help her adjust. Sure, she hadn’t been the tallest person in her family, just brushing five and a half feet if she styled her hair right, but she was definitely used to being larger than this.

In her ransacking of the apartment, she learnt that Zabuza owned very little cleaning supplies.

There was nothing but mold underneath the sink, a single toothbrush in the bathroom, and a bottle of shampoo that was more water than actual shampoo. She grumbled something towards the kid, getting what she assumed was the mental equivalent of a raspberry in return, and made due. The bucket of water was the easiest to procure, since the thing was currently being used as a step stool in the kitchen, and she’d found an odd-smelling slip of soap between the bathtub and the wall.

A few handfuls of old cloth bandages were more rags than anything useful, so she wrapped a few around a fist and set to work.

* * *

Someone knocked.

They paused, fingers stiff from the cold water and generous applications of elbow grease in hard-to-reach corners of the apartment. He didn’t interact with people more than absolutely necessary outside of the academy, let alone know someone well enough to tell them where he lived. She frowned.

Two minutes passed with little sound between them, her breathing scarce in the face of suspicion and paranoia making everything so much worse than it truly was. She almost hoped they had left after getting no answer, but it took four more seconds for them to knock once more.

“Momochi-san?”

Their voice was muffled by wood and distance but the cadence was familiar enough to make her scowl.

_Yamazaki-sensei._

Neither of them liked the man. She rose, unsteadily, and tried to gauge the passed time with a glance out the window. It didn’t help. The mist was still thick and heavy, unwilling to let the village go even in the clutches of the cooler weather.

Yamazaki knocked again before they reached the door, yanking it open and not bothering to greet the nervous-looking man. He seemed more put-together than he had earlier, with another cloth necklace already wrapped around his neck like a very floppy noose. They could yank it and strangle him without a second thought.

Not that she would actually _strangle_ him. Zabuza, on the other hand, would. Most definitely.

They grinned at the thought, slow and sharp, and cut the teacher off mid-sentence about something they hadn’t paid attention to. Yamazaki was missing just enough self-preservation to place a hand on their shoulder.

_Bite him._

That was petty. Tempting, but petty.

“Momochi-san,” the teacher said again, patiently, and their eyes flicked to his face, “please tell me you were listening.”

“No, sensei.” Yamazaki almost flinched at their tone and surprisingly held his place with a frown, hands coming to rest on his hips. They assumed he was trying to look disappointed. It wasn’t really working.

“I _said_ , as you were the only student to pass the…exam this year,” he paused, an emotion they didn’t catch flickering over his face, “you’re being assigned to a team that recently lost a member instead of the usual procedure, alright?”

He wanted them to nod, apparently, so they nodded. Yamazaki removed his hand.

“Good.” He sounded satisfied, crossing his arms over his chest in an awkward motion and smiling down at them. One side of his mouth rose higher than the other. “Hayashi-san will meet you outside of Area Thirteen in a week. Don’t be late.”

They mumbled an affirmative, eyed the mist behind the teacher, and shut the door in his face. The strangled noise Yamazaki made was hilarious, to both of them. He raised his voice to remind them not to be late once again before the footsteps finally left their doorstep.

The name Hayashi held absolutely no significance, conjured up no images or feelings, and she was rather put-off about that. Zabuza had a passing knowledge of their new sensei but probably couldn’t identify them on sight like some of the other top-ranking shinobi in the village.

The training ground known as Area Thirteen, however, was close, if a little on the isolated side. Mostly open field with a small pond and a creek near the back. They locked the door, picked up their rags, and got back to work.

They had a week to figure this out before being forced to interact with other shinobi. _Which they were now, get used to it._

No big deal.

Hopefully.

**Author's Note:**

> lemme know if i need to tag any squicks or triggers yeah? i'm pretty bad at that


End file.
